Richerino and I started our running yesterday...

...and I wanted to post our cadence (the clean one) for posterity. This is one my Dad (ex UDT/SEAL type) used to sing when running (again, this is the family oriented version but the original is close except at the end.)

C130 rollin down the strip
Airborne froggies gonna take a little trip

stand up hook up shuffle to the door
jump right out and count to four

if my chute don't open wide
i gotta another one by my side

and if that one should fail me too
I'll be on the ground before you

if i die in a combat zone
box me up and ship me home

put my fins up on my chest
and bury me in leanin' rest

Planet Fallout

Long time, no blog... New TV setup

Apologies for not having blogged in such a long time, I know Scrappy was about to remove me from her list of friends because of it, lol. Hold on Scrappy!

Anyhow, I thought I'd share some recent tribulation regarding setting up a flat panel television in your house (in my case, over the mantel of the fireplace.) Now, I wanted to have the "nothing to see here but the TV" kind of approach so that none of the components (Xbox 360, comcast HD DVR, VCR/DVR-R) would be visible as they were to reside in a cabinet built into the family room wall. This looks simple, sounds simple, but for me it was in reality a real pain in the a**. ;)

I'll avoid describing the annoying pain I went through learning how to run cable, what types of cable to run, what wall plates to get, the agonizing groan when I remembered that my remote(s) are IR and not RF and therefore do not penetrate wood cabinet doors (I know, I'm an idiot...) I'll simply put the steps I would take NOW to do this. I presume that you already have your components themselves. I also presume that you already have an electrical outlet above your mantle otherwise you'll need to hire an electrician to put one in for you Remember, if you don't feel competent performing these actions, don't blame me if you screw up your drywall/sheetrock/electrocute yourself, et cetera. America has become a land of litigation and I take no responsibility for your actions.

(1)Purchase TV, I recommend measuring the width of the area you wish to place it, in my case a Samsung PN58A550 (which fit perfectly between two areas of molding over the mantle.)

(2)Purchase installer service - you do NOT want to be doing this yourself unless your a professional handyman merely for the liability issues involved in a 120 pound television tearing out of the studs of your wall when there could be children near. I highly recommend searching your local area for home theater personnel to do this and skipping using services like Firedog (although I hear they're actually excellent) due to the expense. Companies like Firedog have package deals and won't simply "hang the mount and TV" because they'll charge you for wiring and everything else regardless of whether you have them wire it or not. BTW, they also charge an extra fee if the TV goes over a fireplace (which they don't mention but a friend mentioned this to me.) Anyhow, $400+ to properly bolt a TV mount to a wall and then hang the TV on it is just a little too much. The choice is yours.

(3)Go to radio shack or some other store which carries wall plates and buy two or 4 bull nose wall plates (depending upon how many cables you are going to run. I ran two HDMI and a set of component video and audio through a single bull nose and it barely fit - 7 cables in total.) Get an equal number of simple junction boxes as well.

(4)Depending upon the distance between your components and your TV you can use light HDMI cables (higher AWG means slimmer more flexible cables) instead of heavy ones and if the distance is short (15 feet or less) you can simply run the HDMI directly from the back of the component into the back of the TV - if longer I recommend getting two Beldin twisted pair HDMI cables (get all of your cables at www.bluejeancables.com by the way - the best quality and prices by far) and run those cables inside your walls and have them connecting to HDMI wall plates at either end. Then simply connect your component to the wall plate with a 1 foot flexible HDMI cable and connect your TV to the other wall plate via another 1 foot flexible HDMI cable. Don't try to connect your component directly to the TV with the heavier gage cables as this will affect your TV's tilt ability and possibly damage the inputs on the rear of the TV.

(5)Get an IR extender, I highly recommend the relatively inexpensive Hot Link Pro (http://www.hot-link.com) I was a little worried about it at first, but once I received it and installed it, it works great. No problems with plasma IR interference with the Samsung either (apparently this was an issue with earlier plasma televisions.) I highly recommend getting the extension cable for the IR 'eye' as well (there's a cheap one available on Amazon iirc) so that you can run that cable through the wall as well in order to put the IR extender's 'eye' just at the base of the TV itself so you only ever point your remote at the TV (not the TV and over to where the component rack/closet and 'eye' are) - the default cable that comes with the hot link pro is about 6 feet long.

(6)Beg/borrow/steal a wire guide/fishing tape. This is what you will use to run the cables through your walls. You can hack one of these together (like I did) but it's extremely unfun and it's always better to "use the right tool for the job" believe me.

(7)Beg/borrow/steal a drywall saw.

(8)Optional - Buy a Logitech Harmony One universal remote. OMG it was easy to setup, very nice, IS RECHARGABLE, and works very well (at least so far, hehe...)

Now, I would do the following once I'd accumulated all these things:

(1)If possible, test EACH cable you plan to run, I can imagine no greater disappointment than busting your butt running cables and then finding out that one or more of them don't work. This is highly unlikely to occur, but hey, running cables is not fun for me.

(2)Run your cables. Find a likely spot in your component cabinet that shares a common wall with the mantle/fireplace. Use a pencil and outline the junction box against where you'd like to place it. Use the drywall saw to cut this out. Do the same above the mantle in a spot that will be reasonably close to where the inputs on your TV will be when the TV is hung. Don't put in the junction boxes yet. Get a friend and a flashlight and start feeding your wire guide as close as you can toward the other hole in the drywall. Your friend should be looking through his/her drywall hold trying to catch a glimpse of your wire. Once they see it, they use the fishing tape to retrieve it. This is the hairiest part of the whole deal for me. Once you gotten a hold of that wire, it's all just regular old work. Once you do so, I HIGHLY recommend running some strong fishing line through with the wire guide. Use enough fishing line so that the line comes out the far drywall hole and can then be taped/tied to the other end of itself to make a circle. You want to do this so that you can attach your cables (a cable or two/three at a time) to it and simply pull on the fishing line to run these cables through the wall. I cannot stress enough the need to use strong fishing line, to securely attach your cables to it when running them, and to inspect the line every time you pull a cable, looking for abrasions and/or damage of any kind. If you see any damage, use it to run another line through before it breaks. Once you've run all the cables you want (make sure there's enough slack on each side of the drying holes), put in your junction boxes. You could do this before, but when I did I found that they interfered a bit with running the cables until I removed them again. Then put in your wall plates. You should know have a nice looking connection in your component cabinet with loose cables dangling out, and a similar connection above your mantle. I HIGHLY recommend that when you're done running cable you untie the fishing line from itself, tape one end of it securely on the mantle (where it will be covered by the TV) and roll up the slack and tape it under the top of your component cabinet so that you can run cable again in the future if you wish without having to fish for the wire guide (which seems like it would be tough if cables are already running through there.)

(3)Now you can have the installers come put up the TV mount (make sure you have purchased the correct mount for the type and size of your television, I used the x-large tilt mount.) Make sure the installers place the mount at the correct height you desire or your wife may yell at you (luckily mine expressed her displeasure before they permanently mounted it.)

(4)If the installers didn't connect the inputs, go ahead and do so now. Test the TV, get everything working from each component before moving on.

(5)Setup your universal remote (if you're going to use one), get everything working before moving on.

(6)Setup your IR extender. In my case this meant using the line I'd luckily kept to run my late arriving extension cable so that I could attach the IR extender's eye to the bottom of the TV behind a grill where you can't see it, then attaching little IR flashers to the IR sensitive spots on my components.

(7)Open a beer, sit down, and enjoy your new TV.

For fellow fans of BucketHead...

Here is a clip of him playing with G&R (who I personally can't stand) where he does some funny stuff like doin' the robot and then plays some serious licks. Enjoy!

Kim suggested we find out what kind of 'dog' we...

...all are (especially the men I presume.)

Here's my results :)

I really like Qt but when you find something...

...as amateurish as a filename with a space in it breaking their tools (qmake) it makes you wonder.

Specifically, if you have a file name 'My Filename.cpp" and you run "qmake -project" you get a project file that has failed to wrap the filename in quotes which is required by "qmake -makefile" - ridiculous. You have to edit the *.pro file by hand.

You're probably thinking what I was thinking "there's a switch or option somewhere that he's missing" - nope.

So - If you find your attempt to produce a makefile resulting in weird errors where one filename becomes two, edit your *.pro and wrap those filenames with spaces in quotes yourself ;).

Using VS 2005 and the Open Source version of Qt for Windows

I found myself with some free time the other day and wanted to play with using Qt on Windows as I have been using it for fun on various Linux flavors for years. I even went so far, on Linux, as to write an 'intellisense' like autocompletion class that I put into my own little code editor (because I deal with a lot of APIs both in my day job and my own activities.)

This time though I wanted to use it with Visual Studio 2005 and let VS do the work for me. Some initial attempts at this (I am using the open source windows version which is available as of Qt4.x) failed miserably but I finally managed to get things going after checking a few blogs (most notably Bennet Smith's.)

The version of Qt I am using is Qt 4.3.4 (you should know this because qmake command line args change occasinally [as they have between 4.x versions already]) so this should work for you if you have installed and built Qt 4.3.4 on your Windows box and have Visual Studio installed correctly.

The general process, at least for me, is to create a new toolbar in VS and add two buttons to it for triggering "qmake -project" and "qmake -makefile", then to create a Visual C++ Makefile project and edit the nmake parameters of the project. After this you should be able to use both intellisense, debug, and build using your normal build methods without a hitch.

Let's get started!

Step 1 - create a new toolbar to contain your new Qt specific commands

We want to create 2 buttons, both run the 'qmake' command, the first one runs qmake to produce a *.pro (qmake project) file and the second one generates a makefile from that *.pro file.

(1)In VS select ToolsExternal Tools to bring up the external tools menu.

(2)Press the Add button, and fill in the following properties as below:
Title: qmake project
Command: <>qmake.exe
Arguments: -project
Initial Dir: $(ProjectDir)

(3)Press the Add button and fill in the following properties as below:
Title: qmake makefile
Command: <>qmake.exe
Arguments: -makefile -spec win32-msvc2005
Initial Dir: $(ProjectDir)

If you wish, you can also set the checkbox for "Use Output Window" for these buttons (I do in case there's a problem) You may also wish to add buttons to launch Qt Designer and Qt Assistant here as well (as I did.)

Now that you have new external tools configured, let's put them on a new toolbar to help us build Qt projects.

To add a new toolbar to VS go to ToolsCustomize and then select the Toolbars tab on the dialog and press the New button. Put in whatever you want for the toolbar name, because you may ultimately have more than one version of Qt installed I recommend putting something like "Qt 4.3.3" as the title.

To add the buttons we want to this new toolbar choose the Commands tab on the Customize dialog, then find the Tools entry in the categories listed and in that sub-category find the external commands.

You need to figure out which commands are your qmake commands because for some odd reason VS simply gives them numbers. For most people they will be the two last external tool entries by number but for others who have had other external tools installed and then uninstalled (such as myself) you may have to count the number of entries for external tools in the drop down menu on the main UI because in my case my qmake entries were #10 and #11 and I had external tool numbers all the way up to 23.

You can simply drag the entries from the sub category list onto the toolbar and the title should show up and tell you if you've selected the correct entry. If you just see 'external tool #" it's the wrong one.

Step 2 - Create a VS project file for use with Qt

(1)Choose FileNewProject
(2)Under Project Types, choose General
(3)Choose Makefile Project from the list of sub projects now showing
(4)Give it the location you desire
(5)Press the Ok button and when the application wizard pops up press the Finish button

Now that the project has been created, we need to edit some of its properties:

(1)Bring up the project's properties
(2)Choose Debug as the project type
(3)Choose Configuration Properties
(4)Choose NMake, and under the NMake properties on the right side:
(5)Set Build Command Line to: nmake debug-all
(6)Set Rebuild All Command Line to: nmake debug-clean debug-all
(7)Set Clean Command Line to: nmake debug-clean
(8)Set CLR Support to: No CLR support
(9)Add to Preprocessor Definitions: UNICODE; QT_LARGEFILE_SUPPORT; QT_DLL; QT_GUI_LIB; QT_CORE_LIB; QT_THREAD_SUPPORT
(10)Set Include Search Path to the corresponding locations of your Qt install:
(mine for example are: C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\Qt;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\Qt3Support;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtAssistant;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtCore;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtDBus;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtDesigner;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtGui;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtNetwork;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtOpenGL;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtScript;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtSql;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtSvg;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtTest;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtUiTools;C:\Qt\4.3.4\include\QtXml)
(11)Set the project type to release and perform steps 5-10 replacing the word debug with release

Now, save everything, and before you do anything else, press the qmake project button on your toolbar (this should generate a *.pro file in the solution directory) and then press the qmake makefile button (this should result in a Makefile being placed in the project directory) and now you can simply choose "Build Solution" from the Build menu of VS and everything should be up and running.

Hope this helps someone out there :)